Aquaculture Canada and WAS North America 2022

August 15 - 18, 2022

St Johns, Newfoundland, Canada

ENABLING EASE OF ACCESS TO COMPLEX SPATIAL DATA: DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTERACTIVE GIS MAP TO SIMPLIFY AQUACULTURE DECISION MAKING

 Nargis L*, Reid GK, Lewis-McCrea L

 

 

Centre for Marine Applied Research

27 Parker street, COVE

Dartmouth, Nova Scotia

B2Y 4T5

lnargis@perennia.ca

 



 The development of novel aquaculture operations requires extensive information on the local environment, infrastructure, and available support services. Compiling and sorting this information is an important prerequisite for supporting sound regulatory and business decision making. Despite the availability of various high-quality applicable data, the large quantity and disparate sources of different data sets requires extensive effort to collect and evaluate in a coherent manner. To help address this problem the Centre for Marine Applied Research partnered with the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and provincial departments to create a single-GIS platform that shows important infrastructure, environmental data and services to support aquaculture development in Nova Scotia. An online interactive GIS map was  developed in an ArcGIS Platform and posted on the CMAR website. Over fifty spatial layers make available a wide range of spatial data important to net-pen, shellfish and land-based aquaculture. This presentation reviews the tool functionality, available data layers and examples of how this tool can support pragmatic decision making for aquaculture.